With Enemies Like These
by Eatsscissors
Summary: Rachel doesn't know how to act like a human, and Santana's heart needs to grow three sizes. Together, they fight crime! Okay, maybe not the second part.  Spoilers through 2.3, "Grilled Cheesus."


TITLE: With Enemies Like These

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: PG-13

FANDOM: Glee

CHARACTERS/PAIRINGS: Santana, Rachel, and Brittany, with shades of Rachel/Finn, Santana/Finn, Santana/Puck, and Santana/Brittany. Aw, hell, you know what: have you watched the show? Those are the pairings.

SPOILERS: Through 2.03, "Grilled Cheesus".

SUMMARY: Rachel doesn't know how to act like a human, and Santana's heart needs to grow three sizes. Together, they fight crime! Okay, maybe not the second part.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: So, apparently it was this chick named Aud's birthday, and I guess she's pretty cool, if you like them hyperactive, hilarious, and willing to do minor violence or whatever. Happy (late, I am aware that I suck) birthday, bb!

"That skirt is looks like it came from K-Mart."

It's been months since Santana threw a slushie in her face; Rachel can tell because while she's standing there blinking and watching Santana's skirt swish off down the hall towards her next class, she feels vaguely hurt.

Santana tries to hit a C6 in glee practice that afternoon and goes sharp so hard and fast that even Mr. Schuester winces and turns his face away from the sound slightly. "Okay, okay, ease up," he says, waving his hands at Mercedes, Kurt, and the rare addition of Puck as they snigger and everyone else looks vaguely uncomfortable. Puck ignores Mr. Schuester altogether and doesn't stop until Santana cuts him a look. (Rachel makes a mental note: learn how to cut a look.) "It's okay, Santana, it's just not going to happen today. Let's give someone else a whirl." Rachel immediately straightens in her seat, but Mr. Schuester doesn't even look at her. "Tina, how about you hop up here."

"Um, Mr. Schuester?" Rachel says, raising her hand even though she's fairly certain that she's the only one doing so that afternoon. Manners are important. She thinks that she sees Mr. Schuester sigh faintly before he nods to her, but surely she's imagining things, because he's an educator and he wouldn't-

"Yes, Rachel?"

"I've been able to hit a C6 since I was twelve," Rachel says in a rush. "In fact, I was the youngest person in the history of La Petite Boheme Musical Academy-" From a few chairs away, she notices that Kurt, who sits two seats away from her in French class is mouthing along as he translates in his head and realizes that the name of the school doesn't really make sense, especially considering that most of its students lived on cul-de-sacs, but that's neither here nor there. "To be able to reach such an ambitious note, and Madame Renault assured me that-"

"I am not surprised by any of that, Rachel," Mr. Schuester cuts her off quickly enough to make her lean back in her chair, tucking her chin in towards her chest a little. "But we're going to give other people a shot at it first, okay?"

"I was just going to say that I could demonstrate the proper technique," Rachel finishes, very softly and mostly to herself, because Mr. Schuester is not listening, he's trying to demonstrate to Tina correct breath control. Finn, who has spent most the afternoon's practice looking vaguely green at the idea that he's going to have to try the note, too, even though none of the boys except for maybe Kurt even remotely have a shot and that they know it (Coach Sylvester has been on an Title Nine kick for the last three weeks, mostly so that she can attempt to steal as many football players as possible so that the Cheerios can be thrown higher, and everyone is watching their step), still reaches over and takes her hand. She is very glad when he does not vomit on it.

Tina's voice is better suited to the attempt than Santana's is, but she still goes shrill in the middle hard enough to make Puck mutter something about dog whistles and then blurt out an obscenity that Rachel can see Mr. Schuester pretend not to hear as Mike leans forward and punches him hard in the back of the neck. Rachel starts to raise her hand again. Finn grabs for her wrist and pulls her back down. Rachel only has a few seconds to wonder what he'll do if she just tries to raise the other hand, instead, when Mr. Schuester thanks Tina for trying, gives her a few more tips on loosening up her throat, and calls it early quits for the day.

"Her throat is not the problem, she's not pulling from her diaphragm, I know a very good technique-" Rachel starts as she and Finn exit room together. Finn stops her by kissing her. He has a way of doing that, and while Rachel very much likes the idea, she can't help but feel a bit like one of those Russian dogs every time that he does it. "I was doing it again?" she asks.

"It's usually best to cut in before you run out of breath," Finn says. He kisses her again, this time on the tip of her nose, and Rachel can't help but smile. "Hey, listen, I can't come over to your house for dinner tonight."

The smile slips. He always finds time to come over in the afternoons if they're going to make out, Rachel thinks, or if they're going to study, or if they're going to start out studying and then end with making out. "Why not?" Rachel asks. "My dads have been wanting to have you over for weeks, Daddy's making pumpkin ravioli-" Something terrible happens to Finn's face. "It's _good_, you know that if you eat too many nitrates or preservatives, it's been shown that they can have an effect on your body all the way from tumors to a low sperm count-"

"Oh, God, Rachel, don't say that word," Finn says quickly. He looks far too mortified for the idea of kissing Rachel in order to shush her again to be on the table. She wonders briefly if he meant "tumors" or "sperm count."

"You've rescheduled twice already, Finn," Rachel says. She wants to tug at her hair, fold her arms over her chest, or do any of the other small fidgets that she ordinarily tries to control because her therapist has told her that they signal to others that she is not an open presence, but she doesn't, because Finn looks like he's really sorry, but...he's still not coming.

"I know," Finn tells her. "I know." He takes her by the hands. "But Burt's coming home from the hospital today, so me and my mom kinda wanted to help Kurt do something for him."

"Oh. Well, um, okay." Rachel brightens. "Hey, maybe I can bring the ravioli recipe over for your mother, it's super heart-healthy and has all kinds of antioxidants, which have been shown to have a revitalizing effect-"

"I can't kiss you if you say 'sperm' again," Finn tells her.

"I won't. Have, um, fun with Burt and Kurt." Rachel watches Finn go down the hall before she heads out an opposite entrance towards her own car, and she wonders only as she's reaching the doors why she wasn't invited over, too. Because it's a family affair, probably, she assures herself, and because she already said that Daddy was making something special for dinner. And because she's a lot of things, but she knows that she's not a soothing influence, and she's fairly certain that it would have an adverse affect on their detente if Kurt has to visit his father in the hospital all over again. Right.

Rachel walks out to her car in the school parking lot and sees Santana a few spaces away, getting into her own. Their eyes meet for an uneasy second as Rachel, at least, realizes that it's now too late for her to just get into her vehicle and leave without saying _something_, and Santana doesn't actually have anything in her hands other than her purse, so-

Santana sniffs and adjusts the strap over her shoulder. "That sweater looks like your grandmother gave it to you," she says. "But I guess family's important, and she might leave you something in her will."

"Thank you?" Rachel watches Santana for a moment more, trying to figure out firstly if that was actually a compliment and secondly if she's supposed to return one now, and then says suddenly, "I think that you can hit the C6 if you try."

Santana turns back around, one eyebrow cocked at a dangerous angle. Rachel has never seen anyone who can jut their hip as if they mean to go to war with it before. "I know that I can," she says.

"I'm not insulting you!" Because sometimes people really don't get that about her. "You're way more mezzo soprano than you are anything else, so being able to hit a C6 would be a pretty remarkable achievement, actually, but your technique is surprisingly proficient-do you know Madame Renault?" Santana turns away again and starts to unlock her car. "You just need to loosen your throat a little-I'm not making a promiscuity joke." Because Santana had been doing that thing with her hip again. "I could show you how, sometime-that's not a promiscuity joke, either, please don't."

Halfway through sliding into her car, Santana leans back out long enough to say, "Berry, take a Ritalin." She _does_ roll down her window as she backs out of her space, though, and doesn't appear to be fumbling around in her passenger seat for a convenient frozen beverage. "I hardly have time for the Cheerios and glee as it is without going any more-" Santana pauses and makes a weird fluttering motion with her fingers that Rachel cannot immediately figure out _how_ is supposed to be derogatory, but she knows that it is. "Extracurricular. Thanks." Santana drives out of the lot at a speed that almost dares a little old lady to stumble in front of the vehicle.

"Okay, then," Rachel says to herself, and heads home.

"I'm supposed to tell you that you look like a public service announcement for strangers with candy," Brittany announces to Rachel at the door to AP French the next morning. Kurt, slipping around her and into the classroom himself, pauses and gives her a head-to-toe look as if he sees it, but he doesn't say anything. Brittany cranes her neck to look inside the classroom. "I thought that there would be more berets," she says in a faintly disappointed tone before she turns and walks away towards her own class. Rachel looks down at her blouse, which one of Daddy's aunts picked up in New York City for her and which Rachel swears carried the smell of the place all the way home, just for her, even if it didn't come from a little boutique on Fifth Avenue. She frowns before she stomps her way into the classroom just as the Mr. Suarez is closing the door behind the stragglers.

"You know, she has a point. We _do_ already know the way to Sesame Street," Kurt leans over to whisper to her as she takes her seat and opens her book.

Rachel huffs and does her best to cut Kurt the same kind of look that Santana threw at Puck that made him shut his mouth the day before. One eyebrow goes up. She doesn't think that she's doing it right.

Rachel is so flustered that for the rest of the hour she's doing well to remember her verb tenses, and when she ultimately asks Amy McCreary for directions to the nearest teacup, Mr. Suarez sighs, pinches at the bridge of his nose, and tells her that he expected more of her. She freezes for a moment before she manages to sink slowly back down into her chair again and stares at her notebook for the rest of the class period.

Lima's selection of vegan meal options in the cafeteria is shameful, but Rachel learned after her miserable attempt at a petition during freshman year (she had to get the gum cut out of her hair) that it was really much easier to bring something from home than attempt to pick the ham cubes-or they might even be a cheese product, is the scary thing-out a wilted, browning salad. She therefore bypasses the line altogether and heads straight for Santana's and Brittany's table before the cafeteria is too crowded, because Rachel really, really knows that this is not going to end well. And yet, like many of the other great social disasters of her life, she can see where it's going from ten miles away and _yet not bring herself to stop._

Santana and Brittany are sitting alone. Brittany looks perfectly untroubled by the solitude, but Santana is shooting glares at the Cheerios table where Quinn is holding so fiercely that Rachel is a little surprised that she hasn't gotten detention by now, because it's pretty obvious what she would be saying if she could. They have two thermoses of Sue's dubious nutritional supplement sitting in front of them, two diet cokes, and a shared pack of Skittles. Somehow, none of this seems like a contradiction.

"There is nothing wrong with the way that I dress!" Rachel blurts out as soon as she's within a few feet of Santana's table. She might have been miscalculating when she had decided that doing this while the lunch crowd was still relatively sparse was a good idea, as she forgets her inside voice and winds up turning every head in the near vicinity their way. The student clerk running the concession stand automatically starts making more cherry. There are already way too many students in this school who took absolutely the wrong message from _Carrie_, and Rachel starts to feel cold in advance. She can't remember if she put an emergency sweater in her locker this week or not.

Santana leans back in her seat slowly, looking Rachel up and down, and Rachel's thoughts shift frantically from bad horror movies to equally bad Westerns. All that they need now is for someone to be wearing spurs. "God, Rachel," Santana says. She pauses to sort among the Skittles scattered on the table in front of them until she locates two purple ones, keeping one for herself and handing the other to Brittany almost daintily. "I'm just trying to keep you from being kidnapped by a ring of pedophiles and sold to make amateur porn in Central America, there's no reason to be such a bitch about it."

"You-" Rachel cranes her neck to look. Santana's skirt is even shorter than hers is, and she's not even wearing tights. "Well, at least I don't look like, like-" Puck had borrowed her laptop one time and had not been discreet in clearing out the browser history, one of many reasons that she had quietly slipped him up the stairs every time that they were...studying before he could encounter either of the parents. "Like a cheerleading fetish video!"

Santana leans further back in her chair. Rachel wants to know what she's put on the bottoms of the legs to keep herself from flipping over. "I'm impressed," Santana says slowly, though her tone sounds anything but. Rachel cringes as she sees the line start queuing up outside the concession stand. If she runs now, she might be able to escape in time. Her _actual_ salad, which means no meat products, will taste just as good outside in the quad. "I didn't think that your dads let you watch anything other than PBS."

_I don't live in a fairy princess bubble, you've made pretty sure of that_, Rachel thinks, but before she can find a way to phrase it or brace for the inevitable shock of her sweater being pulled back and blended ice particles, high-fructose corn syrup, and red no. five being dumped down the line of her spine, Santana slams the front legs of her chair back down to the floor. It sounds a little bit like the bad guy in all of those terrible Westerns going for his gun, and Rachel is very glad that she's not the only one jumps.

"What kind of doctor is your first gay dad?" Santana asks her.

"A cardiologist," Rachel answers slowly, not sure where this is going.

"Great." Santana smiles at her in a way that makes Rachel a little scared, carefully scoops up the rest of the purple Skittles so that she can deposit them into Brittany's hand and is beamed at in return, and collects her things. "Then his credit card will have a high limit. Meet us at the mall on Saturday."

"Oh," Rachel says. She's not certain that the next syllable out of her mouth was going to be, "Kay," but Santana doesn't seem to think that part of the equation is necessary. Rachel is now watching two sets of skirts swish away from her, and the rest of the cafeteria is staring at her like they would the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, or maybe Jesus. Santana's and Brittany's ponytails even swing in tandem. Finn appears beside her and takes her hand, a little hesitantly and as if he thinks that maybe Santana booby-trapped her.

"Um," Rachel says. "What just happened?"

"I'm not sure," Finn answers. "But I think that maybe you pulled a dragon's tail and then agreed to go shopping with it."

"Oh. Just so we have that clear, then." Rachel thinks that maybe this has something to do with the C6, but she was just trying to be _nice_, why does know one ever get that about her? It's very possible that she's going to die this Saturday, and no one but Finn is ever going to get that about her.

Lima Center Mall has fourteen different restaurant and snack bar options available at its food court, not to mention the pretzel place, the Auntie Ann's cookies, and the Cinnabon on the way there. Rachel treads very warily, the strap of her purse turned a little slick from how hard her palms are sweating, and she _never_ sweats before she sings, that's the one thing that she always knows she can do right. The pretzel place has mustard that can be squirted down the front of her blouse, the Cinnabon has frosting that can be smeared into her hair, the Auntie Ann's-Rachel's actually pretty certain that they don't sell the cookies hot enough for Santana to do anything physically dangerous with chocolate, but they still sell drinks. To say nothing of everything that can be carried from the food court-

"Did you bring it?" Santana is sitting on a bench outside of the Forever 21, Brittany beside her. They both have their hair down and are wearing normal clothes. It makes Rachel blink a little, because she had been nearly convinced that they even showered in their Cheerios uniforms, and then just ran their hairdryers over themselves from head to toe as a normal part of their grooming process.

Santana rolls her eyes and snaps her fingers when Rachel doesn't answer right away. "Berry! Get your pulse below one hundred, we're not conducting a drug deal."

"But I think that that security guard is with the CIA," Brittany says.

Santana opens her mouth, then glances towards the security guard in question, who is definitely _not_ watching them because Rachel probably has naked terror written on her face. "No, Brit, he's watching us because you're wearing a tight shirt and he's a lech," she says before cutting the guard the same look that shut Puck a few days before and turning back to Rachel. "Yes or no question. You can even sing the answer if you want."

"I got it," Rachel says. Santana looks slightly impressed. Rachel is fairly pretty sure that Santana thinks that Rachel stole it, and Rachel is still nervous enough about her odds of survival that she's not going to tell Santana that she _asked_ for it, actually, as an early birthday present and with many promises not to go overboard, and even then only thinks that she got her way because Daddy was so quietly pleased at the implication that she was going out with friends. One could only pre-treat a purple stain out of a yellow sweater so many times before certain things about your daughter's social life began to be assumed. "But I told Finn that if I didn't text him in fifteen minutes, he's supposed to call the police and tell them that you locked me in a dumpster and stole it, so-"

Santana holds up a finger. "One," she says. "Don't ever tell the villain your master plan." Rachel is not shocked in the slightest to learn that Santana actually does think of herself as a villain, and that it doesn't bother her. "It's just stupid. Two, why do you think that I asked you here?"

_Because you don't shave off a thick layer of green fur daily and might be an actual person?_ is Rachel's first thought, because obviously she has spent too much time listening to Puck. And just as obviously, the incident in French class was not a one-off, because that's just dumb. "I kind of thought that you wanted to lure me here, take my dad's credit card, and then pelt me with a wider selection of nutritionally void treats than the concession stand at the high school actually carries."

Santana sighs, uncrosses her legs, and stands. She grabs for Brittany's wrist as she does so, and Rachel notices that Brittany is still watching the security guard, her lips moving as if she's trying to pass him a coded message. "Rachel," Santana says. "The only time that you actually manage to look post-pubescent is when we're competing and someone has literally picked your clothes out for you. My star has already fallen far enough as it is, I don't need it to sink any lower just because I have to spend a couple hours a week in the company of someone that Osh Kosh B'Gosh forgot. Besides, if I save everyone in the school for the next two years from the retinal damage of having to look at you in your current state, I get to call it charity and get my mom off of my back. I'm already not allowed back at the food bank."

"She made a pastor cry," Brittany says. She has stopped paying attention to the security guard, presumably because he has finally realized that Santana is not going to let Brittany wander off and turned his energies towards luring someone else off into his van.

"Not by hitting him or anything," Santana defends herself.

"Somehow I already knew that that was going to be your answer," Rachel says. She starts to turn away and then pauses, and not just because Santana gets a little bit scary around the eyes when someone turns their back on her without her permission. Dad and Daddy both will get a look if she comes back empty-handed, no matter if she does manage to put together a lie about just not seeing anything that piqued her interest. She's told those lies before, usually after the yellow sweater has just surfaced in spite of her best attempts to keep it out of sight until she had a chance to stain-treat it herself. They'll try to hide it, but she'll still see. "So your plan was to throw some reflected glory back on yourself by making me trendy?"

"I could never make you trendy," Santana says. "I'm hoping to avoid the slushie brigade myself by making you less objectionable until I can knee Quinn in the face and claw back to the top of the pyramid. You get to come along for the ride and maybe absorb some of the basic tenets of human grooming that come to the rest of us easily."

"Didn't you also say that you hit-" Brittany starts. Santana releases Brittany's wrist only so she can pinch it, and Brittany yelps. "You're supposed to _ask _first," she says, sounding wounded.

"Well, thank you," Rachel says, drawing herself up. She might be hit in the back of the head with a ketchup-covered bagel dog on the way out, but at least she'll make it three, possibly as many as four steps with her dignity intact. "But if that's the case, I would rather wear the kitten sweater than my Nana got for me and hand-wash slushie out of it every day. I don't need friends who are only in it to, to increase their social bank account by pulling mine out of the negative."

"You really kind of do," Brittany tells her. Rachel blinks at her, surprised, until Brittany shrugs and says, "Sometimes it splashes on me, too."

Santana cuts Brittany approximately half the look that she threw at Puck and the security guard before she can catch herself. "If you get hit with a slushie in anything that I pick out for you, I'll pay for your dry-cleaning," she says.

Rachel has a feeling that this is as close to seeing Santana ask nicely for something that she wants as anyone ever sees, and she's still about to turn away again until she pauses to consider the implications of a whole day without anything being thrown at her. Kurt has already started to give her lectures on what preservatives thrown at sub-freezing temperatures and a high rate of speed can do to a person's complexion; he even had a kind moment and slipped her a couple of sample bottles earlier that week. "As long as you don't make the skirts too short," she says warily.

Rachel has never been in this boutique before, probably because it's tucked away in a far-off corner of the mall where businesses nearly always fail and yet still carries the air of a faint sneer across its trendy purple facade. Checking the price tag on a skirt, Rachel sucks in her breath and can see why: they surely don't have to sell more than a handful a month in order to cover their overhead, payroll, and then some.

"I can't buy this!" Rachel hisses at Santana, scandalized. Santana is browsing through a rack a few feet away, a bored expression on her face, while a saleslady is visibly keeping an eye on them. As if they could possibly steal anything from here; the leftover money from overhead, payroll, and profit could probably also finance a few guard dogs.

"I understand," Brittany says. She has started to play with the ends of Rachel's hair at some point. _Your therapist tells you that you deserve positive attention_, Rachel tells herself, but she's not getting anything dumped down her clothing (though the saleslady is looking up and down the skirt that Rachel _is_ wearing as if she thinks that it might be improved by it), so maybe that does count as positive, and Rachel is not entirely sure when she all control of this situation. Possibly when she failed on that second syllable two days before.

"It's because you're fat," Brittany finishes to Rachel in a nearly regretful tone. She takes the skirt from Rachel and puts it back onto the rack, shaking her head sadly.

"Brittany," Santana says, sighing. "We don't insult people we're shopping with."

"Oh, right." Brittany picks the same skirt that she took away from Rachel back up from the rack and lays it against her own hips. "I forget."

"She means to say that it'll make you look fat," Santana says. She's carrying a dress in her hands, sleeveless and short, but not embarrassingly so. With a belt around its waist, it could almost be called mod. The color is a deep gold, and when Rachel reaches out before she can stop herself to touch it, she discovers that it's silk.

"I'm pretty sure that's still an insult," Rachel points out, pulling her hand back from the dress before she can talk herself into something foolish.

"No, it's an insult to call you fat and stop there. Telling you that something is going to make you _look_ fat is just advice." Santana thrusts the dress on its hanger up against Rachel's chest. "Here, go try this on."

"Me?" Rachel looks down at the dress. "I thought that you were carrying it because you wanted it."

Santana snorts. "Please. I wear clothes that look as if they were made this century, and I look better in red." She spies the saleslady idling closer to them and snaps, "What? You still have me and Brittany here as collateral, don't you?"

"Santana, please don't make her cry," Rachel blurts out before she can stop herself as she heads off to the dressing room. She still hasn't looked at the tag on the dress. She probably should before she tries it on, but she's scared that she'll give herself a reason to put it back before she tries it on if she does. Santana rolls her eyes and makes a dismissive flicking motion with her fingers; Rachel isn't certain if that means that she's going to come back to find someone in tears or not.

The dressing room is posh, with quilted walls that muffle sounds coming from the main floor. The lighting is also softer than that which Rachel is accustomed to finding in mall dressing rooms, as if it's meant to remind her of what she _could_ be. She closes her eyes after removing her blouse and skirt as she pulls the dress over her head; if it's going to be a disaster, she doesn't want to know right away.

It's not. "Oh," Rachel says softly, looking at herself. The girl-the woman, just almost-who is standing in her bare feet in front of the mirror and with Rachel's red plastic headband knocked askew in her hair still looks as if she could be accepting her first Tony, or stepping out of a limousine to sign autographs before heading in to the theater to change. It hugs against her body in ways subtle enough that they don't make her blush, the skirt falls down to about four inches above her knee, and the golden-bronze color of the silk makes her skin glow. Rachel reaches with slightly trembling fingers for the price tag. "_Oh_," she says again, in a completely different tone of voice. She's extremely careful as she unzips it and hangs it back up on its hanger, puts her normal skirt and blouse back on and smooths her hair back down under her headband.

"Well?" Santana asks as Rachel emerges with the dress in hand. The saleslady is not in tears. She is, however, staying well back and behind the counter, flicking furiously through an inventory sheet that still does nothing to hide how high the color is standing in her cheeks.

"It was beautiful," Rachel says. She looks around for the rack where Santana found it. "And it was also way, way too expensive."

Santana had been examining a cashmere sweater with only half-interest, holding it up first against her chest, then against Brittany's and letting out an unimpressed moue at the results of both. She slams it back down against the rack and rolls her eyes at Rachel's explanation. "Oh, my God, really?" she exclaims to Rachel. "You will spend at least three hours a week-I've counted-being the human equivalent of an over-caffeinated Shi-Tzu just to the people in glee _alone_ until we all want to hold your head under the water in the sink, but you will not, just one time, lay down the cash that will keep people from dumping their lunch into your hair?"

Rachel pauses and wonders whether she really ought to spend any more time than necessary on the fact that, one, Santana is apparently stalking her, and, two-no, she really needs to address that one. "You guys really talk about holding my head under water?" she asks.

"We always talk about letting you up," Brittany says in a helpful tone. "Now."

"This year has been mostly slushies and mean things being written on my locker, really," Rachel goes on. She tells her fingers to unwrap themselves from the dress's hanger, but they don't appear to be listening to her. "There has been very little hot lunches or physical assault at all. And the person who keeps writing mean things can't even spell-"

"Yeah, that's hard," Brittany says. She's picking at her nails. Santana is giving Rachel a look that reminds her a bit of a laser canon somehow melded into a human body, one hand cocked upon her hip.

"So it's been getting better," Rachel finishes, even though even she has to admit that the wind has been taken out of her sails by then.

"Huh," Santana says, giving Rachel a long, slow up-and-down. "You know, all this time I thought that you walked around dressed like you were trying to find your way back to the Rompa Room just because you didn't know any better. I didn't realize that it was because you're a coward." She takes the dress away from Rachel, smirking slightly as Rachel's fingers don't particularly want to let it go.

She's being manipulated, and not even particularly subtly. Rachel still feels color rising in her cheeks, and she says, "Oh, give it to me," before snatching the dress back from Santana and marching up to the register. "This helps you, too, you know," she says to Santana as they're walking out of the store and Santana and Brittany are not taking the opportunity to pelt off in the other direction now that their mission has been accomplished.

"Never said it didn't," Santana says. She looks around the mall with an expression almost akin to a normal person having a religious experience. "So. Where to now?"

It takes Rachel a full thirty seconds to realize that, while she hasn't particularly been invited along, neither has she been told that she can't come.

By early evening, Rachel's feet hurt and she thinks that she knows the interior of the mall better than her own bedroom. Santana and Brittany are both carrying multiple bags; without quite realizing how it's been pulled off, Rachel is carrying a couple of their bags, too. Her own purchases still number just to the one, even though Santana had sniffed that there almost wasn't any point in buying the dress if she was just going to waste it with the wrong accessories and Brittany had petitioned very hard for a pair of patent-leather spike heels that Rachel could not see herself going further than three steps in without breaking an ankle, "so that I'll stop confusing you for a gnome." Even though they've told her that a variety of different things make her look fat, one of them being a charm bracelet, neither of them have taken the opportunity to put anything into her hair or flip her into the large fountain that sits in the center of the mall. Rachel is starting to suspect that they're not going to.

She's fairly certain that friends aren't supposed to call friends fat at all, even if they then push a sweater into her hands, or tell her that she needs to stop talking so fast before she gets arrested as a surprisingly healthy meth freak. She is very confused right now. Shortly before seven, they're even walking towards the exit as some kind of loosely grouped unit, and Rachel-Rachel is fairly certain that she just spent several hours in the company of Santana and Brittany without any physical violence and only unexpectedly mild emotional abuse. She thinks that it's been a good day.

Her cell phone pings at her from her purse. "Oh, my mom's making toaster pizzas tonight!" Brittany exclaims at the sound, and dashes off without another word.

Rachel watches her running off down the sidewalk and asks, "Didn't she ride here with you?"

"Yeah, but Brittany always makes it home eventually," Santana says with a wave that's just a shade too dismissive, considering that Brittany was seriously weighing the pros and cons of getting into an unmarked van earlier. "She's like one of those dogs that fall out of the family car at a rest stop and then winds up on the local news. I put pepper spray in her purse and went over Stranger Danger with her just this morning, she can't have forgotten that quickly."

"It's good that you take care of her," Rachel says, meaning it, but somehow that only makes Santana do that weird, squinty glare-thing at her. She looks at the text in her hand and can feel the corners of her mouth turning down.

"What is it?" Santana asked, in so shockingly good an approximation of human-well, something that a human could reasonably do, even if it didn't make the leap to concern, that Rachel would have been startled if she hadn't been so otherwise occupied. "Look, Rachel, I if my social status weren't already so close to the red that I might as well bet the house, there is no way that I would be risking being seen sharing a sentence with you, so you might as well just spit it out. Did they cancel the Tonys?"

"No, they would never!" Rachel says, whipping her head up, aghast. It takes her several seconds to realize that Santana wasn't being serious, and she feels her cheeks warming. "Finn was supposed to have dinner with me and my dads tonight. He, um-something came up unexpectedly." And she's going to walk in the front door of her house alone, and in spite of the fact that Finn does on occasion due the gentlemanly sit-down before a date and that both of her parents have heard her on the phone with him, Rachel's next therapy session is going to contain the uncomfortable insinuation that she's making him up. "Well, his loss. Daddy's one-hundred percent natural tofu stir fry has been featured in magazines." Santana shrugs, her measure of pretend concern for the day clearly used up now that there's nothing left within it for her, and starts off for her car. "Santana? Do you like Chinese?"

Santana pauses, pivots slowly around in a way that makes Rachel think a little bit of a snake catching sight of a baby bird. "Are you serious?" she asks.

It had been easier to make friends when one of her dad's still had to call the other kid's parents to set up the date. Rachel says, already preemptively wounded, "My dad's have made too much without Finn coming over, anyway, and you really shouldn't be living off of high-fructose corn syrup and ipecac, you're doing terrible things to your metabolism-" Santana's eyebrows quirk up. "I'm just saying. A well-researched vegan diet is beneficial on many levels, from personal health to environmental responsibility to animal rights." Santana might be able to plausibly swing one of her shopping bags at Rachel, but she doesn't have anything else in her hands, and Rachel doesn't think that she would be willing to damage one of her new sweaters for anything as common as ire. She had been holding them almost as if they were babies in the store.

Santana examines her nails and then looks out across the parking lot, as if she's gauging who is there to see her standing with Rachel Berry and by all appearances having an actual conversation. "Whatever," she says finally. "Daddy's been putting in a ton of hours lately because he wants a new Benz, and my mom's already gone through at least three paralegals on this case she's putting together. I could eat."

Dad is in the kitchen while Daddy is setting the table when Rachel comes through the front door, holding her shopping bag in one hand and the door open for Santana to enter after her with the other. "I'm back," she calls.

Daddy walks into the living room and pauses when he sees that the date which Rachel said she was bringing over for dinner is not a tall, broad, strangely laconic football player. "Hi," he says, extending his hand out a second later, because if there is one thing that the Berry household understands, it's that you get absolutely nowhere unless you lay down a foundation of good etiquette first. "You must be a friend of Rachel's."

"Daddy, this is Santana," Rachel says. She thinks that she sees Daddy's head tilt to the side just for a second in recognition of the name and hopes that he doesn't make the connection. It's been months since Santana pelted Rachel with foodstuffs, and longer than that since Rachel was foolish enough to mention any of the goings-on at school at the house longer than it took to ask if they still had any club soda "She's one of the girls that I went shopping with today. Um, Finn can't make it, he had a thing."

"Ah." Daddy's single-syllable responses to Finn's continuing inability to make a dinner date are starting to say more and more. Rachel pretends not to notice. "It's good to meet you, Santana."

Santana takes Daddy's hand and looks around their living room with bright eyes. Rachel shifts her weight from one foot to the other and has no idea how to judge her house through Santana's lens: there are family photographs and some of Rachel's trophies on the mantle, a picture of Dad and Daddy's marriage ceremony when Rachel had been five and then another of all three of them together while Rachel had been in her white flower girl's dress, pictures of Nana and Grandpa, and Grams with Poppy before he had died. It's all impeccably arranged and coordinated, but it's not-Rachel has an image of the inside of Santana's house, even though she's never been, and thinks that probably involves a lot of artful lounging across furniture that was never really meant to be sat upon and possibly martinis being delivered by quiet, frightened maids.

"You have a lovely home," Santana tells Daddy with a smile that would have every other member of glee making a sign of the cross at her, certain that she must be possessed. "Thank you for having me over." Rachel exhales so hard that she almost passes out.

Santana remains on moderately good behavior throughout dinner, eating her stir-fry and brown rice in dainty, lady-like bites, charming both Dad and Daddy with a sweetness that Rachel didn't know she even possessed, referring to them as "Parent One" and "Parent Two" and generally having them eating out of her hand so easily they didn't notice when only one girl actually loaded the dishwasher even though two of them volunteered to do it.

"Santana," Dad says after Santana has consumed her free meal and left. "Why do I know that name?"

Rachel shrugs. "Oh, you know," she says breezily. "She's in glee with me, I've probably mentioned her once or twice."

"Hmm." Dad still looks thoughtful, but he puts his arm around Rachel's shoulders and squeezes her tight. "It's good to see you making friends, pumpkin." What Rachel knows that he's thinking, even though he doesn't say, is that Rachel hasn't had a friend over since she entered junior high, and it's kind of good to have proof that she isn't the only girl at her high school and everyone else just creative hallucinations.

When she goes upstairs, Rachel pulls her dress from its bag and hangs it on the back of her bedroom door so that the wrinkles can fall out overnight and then sits on the edge of her bed and looks at it.

She has on a black cardigan, black Mary Janes, and a headband in her hair that has a small bow on one side. She's holding her books in front of her to instinctively protect the dress, and she flinches every time that someone passes her in the hallway with anything from a slushie to a back of chips to a gel ink pen in their hands. A few heads turn her way as she goes by, a few whispers reach her ears indistinctly, but Rachel learned just a few days into her freshman year that it's best not to listen too closely. The dress swishes back and forth across her thighs, cool even though she's been wearing it for almost an hour now and the silk ought to have warmed. Rachel reaches her locker and starts twirling the combination, shoulders maybe just the tiniest bit hunched. The dress's label technically says "dry clean only" and nothing more, but it still manages to imply that said dry-cleaning had better be at a place where price is not an object. Rachel does not foresee explaining the stains of a blueberry-mango slushie going from the back of her neck down to the lower hem.

"Hey, Rachel." Finn puts his hand on her shoulder without telling her that he's behind her first, turns her around and gives her a kiss. "You look pretty today."

"Do you like it?" Rachel says. She takes the skirt in her hands and swishes it back and forth a little bit.

"You look like Christmas tinsel." Finn takes her hand as she gathers up her books for English III in the other and shuts her locker for her. He taps lightly at the bow in her hair. "I'm sorry about Saturday night, Puck wanted to play-okay, he was watching his little sister, so it was Coke pong, and then we had to clean the kitchen floor and it turns out that -"

"You cancelled on my dads again so that you could play a drinking game?" Rachel asks, leaning away from him just when she had been on the verge of snuggling close.

"Oh, my God, Berry, really?" Santana is in English III during the same period as Rachel and Finn, and she cocks one hip against the door so that they can't enter right away as they approach. She's back in her Cheerios uniform, of course, and her hair is once again pulled back into a ponytail so tight and full of school spirit that Rachel can't help but wonder if this is going to add to her odds of getting a facelift or subtract from them. There's a rumor that Ms. Sylvester gets them done quarterly. There's also a rumor that Ms. Sylvester is the one who started that rumor, and that she actually keeps her face tight through a nightly application of lemon juice, egg whites, and black-market placentas from an animal research hospital. She might have started that one, too, no one is entirely sure.

Finn tightens his arm around Rachel's shoulders automatically. "Santana, lay off of her," he says tiredly. Rachel warms at his defense of her, even if she doesn't so much need to be defended this time. She doesn't blame someone standing on the outside for not getting that. She isn't quite certain that she's not being elaborately punk'd herself.

Santana lifts an eyebrow at Finn in a way that still conveys that she's pulling a gun out of a holster. "Did I give you an audition to be in this show?" she asks him mock-sweetly before turning back to Rachel. "Seriously? You go to all of the trouble of buying grown-up clothing and then you put a toddler's sweater over it? And I thought that Brittany was hard to keep from taking the trench coat candy."

Rachel finds herself smiling before she can help it; Santana called her way meaner things as of Saturday, and that was when she had been trying to emhelp/em. "I'm not wearing the shoes that Brittany picked out."

"Well, you're appealing to an entirely different kind of fetish right now." Santana lifts her hip away from the door and strolls into the room, leaving Finn staring at Rachel.

"Okay, I get hit a lot in football practice, and I did forget to put on my chinstrap last week, but did that just happen?" Finn asks her.

"Santana was kind enough to avail me of her sartorial expertise on Saturday," Rachel says. Finn looks a little blank; though he's been getting much better and Rachel even caught him looking through an encyclopedia in the library a few weeks ago, it's still hard to tell whether it's "sartorial" or "expertise" that is hanging him up. "She and Brittany went shopping with me." The blank look instead becomes one of faint alarm.

"You might want to make sure they didn't get you put on some kind of no-fly list," Finn tells her.

Rachel hadn't considered that. No, there were too many surveillance cameras around the mall that would have caught Santana and Brittany with her. "No, it's okay," she says. "It was an-an exchange of needs. I needed to not get pelted with foodstuffs. Santana needed to not get splashed on by pelted foodstuffs."

Finn makes a disbelieving noise. "I really don't think that being in glee has brought her down that hard-" he starts.

"Hey, Santana," a leering male voice says from within the classroom. "Would you call yourself a grapefruit or a cantaloupe-" Cut off by a squawking cry.

"Inside, children, inside," Mr. Caveny says, walking up the classroom door and making a shooing motion towards Rachel and Finn. As they disperse to their seats, Rachel notices that William Jackson is pressing his hand against his thigh and glaring at Santana, who is twirling a ballpoint pen between her fingers and staring innocently straight ahead. "Mr. Jackson, are you all right?"

"Fine," William grits, sparing a last glare for Santana. He moves his hand, and Rachel notices that there's a hole in his jeans and a spot of blood.

"All right, then, we last left on at the beginning of the second act of _The Mourning Bride,_" Mr. Caveny announces, turning his back to the class so that he can write the act's main points upon the board. Finn leans across the aisle at Rachel.

"Somehow, I think that Santana can turn her fall from grace into a skydive if anyone can," he says. Rachel looks across the room at Santana and notices that she is still looking straight ahead, a muscle in her jaw ticking visibly as she turns the pen over and over again with knuckles gone white.

A funny thing happens to Rachel in the dress. No one talks to her, exactly, but they don't _not_ talk to her, either, and by fourth period she's even stopped dropping her books to make certain that she guards the silk rather than her own face every time that she sees someone walking down the hall carrying a bottle of soda with its cap off. By lunch, she thinks that Santana might have been on to something, and she's in big trouble if she thinks that she can get Daddy's credit card again. In the cafeteria, she startles hard when she sees that there is already a table occupied by Santana and Brittany, of course, but also by Mercedes, who is staring at Brittany as if she's trying to figure out how she got out of kindergarten, and Quinn, who is examining her cuticles between bites of chicken and pretending as if she can't feel Santana trying to bore a hole in her head with glare alone. Rachel looks around the lunch room, but Finn isn't anywhere to be found, and if Santana and Brittany were the ones to convince her to spend large sums of money on frivolous luxury goods-

"Hi, guys," Rachel says, sitting down at the table and starting to unpack the laucki chana dal that Daddy had experimented with the night before.

"Kurt's going to be sitting there," Mercedes says, pointing at Rachel's seat. Rachel freezes for the beat before Mercedes goes on, now pointing at the one directly over, "But that one's free."

Rachel didn't know that it was possibly for one's entire body to uncoil at once. "Great!" She scoots both herself and her food over a seat so that she can finish unpacking. Next petition: if the cafeteria is not going to serve decent vegan options, they can at least provide enough microwaves so that the kids who bring their meals from home aren't stuck with either peanut butter and jelly, salads, or a possible elbow to the face as the feeding frenzy over the few available starts each day.

"What's that?" Mercedes asks, pointing at Rachel's tupperware.

Rachel neatly slides the lid off of her lunch and tucks it under her container, making a mental note to write a very nice letter to the company that made her new thermal lunchbox, as for once her food isn't greasy and tepid. "Laucki chana dal?" she asks. Mercedes' eyebrow goes up. Kurt comes to sit next to Rachel, leans over to look at her lunch, and then wrinkles his nose before he goes back to unpacking his salad; Rachel swears, it's like no one has any imagination. "It's mostly gourd, lentils, and chile powder served over rice, one of my gay dads has been experimenting with Indian cooking lately. You would be amazed at how hard it is to find anything that's not made of fried animal flesh in Lima."

"We have Breadsticks. That counts as exotic," Santana says. She hasn't said a word to Rachel since Rachel sat down. Rachel doesn't know if that's normal for two people who recently went shopping together and had a mutually pleasant time or not.

Kurt ceases poking at his salad long enough to stare at Santana. "It's so inescapably sad that you think that," he says. The squinty glare-thing does have near the effect on him that it would have anyone else at the table.

"Can I trade you for some? Since my brother went to college, my mom's been trying new recipes." Mercedes carefully cuts her burger in half with a plastic knife and holds part of it out to Rachel. "It's okay, it's Boca."

Trading lunches. Rachel remembers how this is supposed to go, and smiles. "Sure." They make the swap, and after a little bit Mercedes even gets Kurt to try a tiny bit and laughs when he chokes and then tries to defend himself by stealing a handful of Mercedes' jalapeno chips. On the other side of Rachel, Finn eats a corn dog while Puck watches with intense fascination, Santana is getting her daily fruit allotment via a pack of Starbursts and engaging in a silent glaring contest with Quinn, who has still not left them for a triumphant return to the Cheerios' table. Archie, Tina, and Mike are all on the second lunch shift, along with Sam, but there's enough overlap so that they can swap tables and say hello to one another, and it's almost...Rachel pauses as she packs up her things to go. It was almost as if they all genuinely liked each other for a little bit. She cuddles up against Finn before he has to leave for his next class; he tastes a little like mint when he kisses her. See, he _is_ a good boyfriend, he's trying not to get his processed meat breath on her.

"Santana!" Rachel calls out to her in the hallway. It's still pretty empty, since most of the late lunch shift is already in line and most of the early one is still dawdling before they face facts and head to class, but there are still enough people that Rachel notices heads turning and smirks spreading. She lifts her chin. She looks pretty today, and more importantly she _feels_ pretty today, and there's already a long list of moments that she intends to graciously and loudly forgive just as soon as she's standing behind a podium with her very first little gold statuette in her hands.

Santana, though, still looks nearly stricken for a second as she takes in the looks before she can cover it up again. "Are you _kidding_ me, Berry?" she hisses at Rachel. Santana twirls the dial on her locker combination aimlessly several times before she settles down to get her books back out, saying from the side of her mouth, "Just because I managed to drag you up a few rungs on the social ladder doesn't mean that I want you to yank me back down with you so that we match." She pauses to look Rachel up and down. "Frankly, after what you managed to do to that dress, I don't want us to ever match."

Rachel pulls back for barely a second before she gathers herself and plunges on. "That would have been far more effective last week before I realized that you have your own translation software," she informs Santana, and receives the squinty glare-thing. Had her hands not been busy with her lunch-ware, Rachel would have taken this as an opportunity to start taking notes. "I wanted to thank you for pretending to be my friend this Saturday. You might have noticed that I have a certain amount of trouble in making them."

"You have trouble making friends because you act like a terrier in need of being whacked on the nose with a newspaper," Santana informs her.

"Thank you also for letting the opportunity to insult my fashion sense go by, but my therapist tells me the same thing in a much more constructive way." She wouldn't have approved of Santana, anyway, and she and Rachel would have had a conversation about the difference between positive and negative attention. "And I know that that jerk in English really bothered you this morning, so from one girl who knows what it's like to turn personal slights into chances to hone her art by pretending that everything's okay, they can just-they can take a long walk off of a short pier."

Santana closes her locker and turns back towards Rachel, books in hand. "'Long walk off a short pier'?" she repeats.

"Not everything has to end in an obscenity to get its point across."

"Don't get the idea that I needed a pep talk, but-" Santana pauses to flick her ponytail back over her shoulder. "Maybe I'll upgrade you from 'terrier' to 'border collie.'" She turns and walks away. Much like every other time that Santana has actually spoken to her over the past week or so, Rachel has no idea what she's supposed to take away from that.

Glee practice is that afternoon. It's mostly routine, discussing fundraising for their inevitable trip to Regionals (wherein Mr. Schuester outright vetoes Puck's suggestion that they start bottling their own wine, and lingers just a touch too long over Sam's idea that they could maybe sell plasma) and going over that week's assignment on "dreams" that Mr. Schuester is maybe clinging to just a little too tightly. Puck keeps muttering things under his breath that make Finn snigger and then color when he catches Rachel looking at him. They don't get a lot done, but Rachel is okay for once with not needing to offer her expertise to those clearly in need.

"Mr. Schuester?" Santana pauses in the doorway when they're allowed to go, effectively stopping everyone else from leaving. Rachel sees Mr. Schuester's eyebrows go up; it's not often that anyone hears Santana actually asking a question unless it's some variation on the theme of "Why do you suck so hard?"

"Yes, Santana?" Mr. Schuester asks.

"I have something that I would like to share with the class." Santana touches lightly at her throat, which Rachel just no realizes she has been doing during their entire two-hour practice, and then, without any preamble, throws a perfect C6. She holds it for nearly five seconds, stopping only when she finally starts to teeter into the shrill, and everyone's mouths fall wide open. Or at least, Rachel assumes that they do, since they're technically all in front of her and she's busy clapping her hands together and hopping in an excited little circle. Finn stays at a distance near enough not to be hit by her and yet still close enough to catch her if she falls to the ground in what Rachel can only assume looks to the layperson like a fairly energetic epileptic fit. Everyone else's shoulders are totally in the poses of people whose mouths ought to be hanging open. Rachel is going to believe that interpretation until proven otherwise.

"What?" Santana asks when she's finished. "You made it sound like it was hard." She turns and leaves the classroom without another word.

"She did it, she did it!" Rachel says excitedly, still wiggling a tiny bit, until she notices that now everyone is staring at her rather than the empty doorway that used to hold a Santana. "This is what you can achieve when you listen to me. I'm only trying to help!" She scampers out of the classroom and in the vague direction of her car, tugging Finn along by the hand as she goes. He doesn't even make startled noises any longer when she displays her rather physics-defying amount of upper body strength.

"You actually helped Santana become a better singer?" Finn asks as Rachel pulls him along down the hallway. "That's...really nice of you, Rachel. I mean, sometimes I think that you would shank one of the other girls with a toothbrush for your solos."

"Not fatally," Rachel chirps automatically. "And it was really easy. She knew how to do it, it was really all just a matter of relaxing her throat-" Finn gets a look on his face, not quite leering the way that Puck or even Artie would have done, Rachel's not sure what he means by it. She is not going to get jealous, though. This is not a jealous day, and you don't get jealous over your friends. Or even the people who act in a friend-like way towards you while still asking repeatedly if Chris Hansen and a camera crew follow you around. "And letting go of what people think of her." Rachel stops. "You really think that I wouldn't help you just because she might compete for my solos?" It's a troubling thought, both that Finn would think that of her and because Santana, if she keeps working at it, might have a shot. That's an entirely different league from being jealous over a boy, even Finn.

"No." Finn definitely has a look. Rachel might not have yet mastered the art of _throwing_ a look, but she definitely knows what they are when she's looking at one. "Okay, sometimes I think that you would buy a bunny and threaten to go all Glenn Close on it if Mr. Schuester stopped giving them to you, but I don't think that you would actually go through with it. Not unless the solo was from _Les Miserables_ or something." Finn leans down and kisses her; Rachel isn't sure if it erases the look on her face or not. "Hey, about dinner-"

She already knew. "I didn't tell my dads that you were coming this time," Rachel says. "I thought that it would be a pleasant surprise, maybe."

"You're awesome." Finn kisses her again and then finally manages to disentangle himself from the grip that she has on his hand. "We should totally put together a fundraising project where you arm-wrestle people. Call you later tonight?"

"Sure." Rachel watches Finn go and then turns away, out into her parking lot and then her car. She spies Santana a few spaces away in an eerie imitation of the conversation that they had a week before, save for the fact that Santana is currently talking to someone on her cell phone. Rachel doesn't know who it is, but whatever they say makes Santana's face glow. When she hangs up, there is about three seconds of silence before Rachel says, "Is your mom still working on that case?"

"You know," Santana says after dinner, while she's lounging across Rachel's bed even though Rachel's not sure that she actually asked if Santana wanted to hang out. All that she knew was that Santana had excused herself to go to the restroom, then had come back and told Rachel that her bedroom was shockingly less lame than it appeared in all of her self-made videos, and had she ever thought of a wide shot? It might cut down on the number of greasy cafeteria egg noodles that the football team put down the back of her shirts. Not make them stop entirely, mind, but maybe she would only have to watch her back every second Tuesday rather than on a daily basis. (Rachel's never solved the mystery of where the football team's getting them on days when the cafeteria isn't serving chicken suprrise, and she isn't certain that she wants to know.) And now Santana's on Rachel's bed, and Rachel's not really sure what to do about it, but she doesn't think that having another girl up here is supposed to be more strange than having a boy. Santana's feet kick idly back and forth a few inches above the carpet. "Parent One should really go to cooking school and stop being a house husband. He could, like, wind up with his own FOX show or something."

"He's a pediatrician," Rachel points out. Santana lifts her head up from the bed long to cock it curiously at Rachel.

"I thought that you said that he was a cardiologist?"

"That's Daddy-um, Parent Two." Rachel is in jeans and her yellow sweater, having rushed upstairs shortly after arriving home with Santana so that she could change out of the magic dress and hang it up. She's pretty certain that clothes like that are ruined by the odd gloop of tomato sauce the same way that horseshoes are ruined by hanging them so that the open end is pointed down, even if she could have prayed the stain out later. It's currently hanging in the closet, spaced well away from the other pieces clothing so that they don't get jealous.

Santana is up on her elbows, staring at Rachel intently. "So let me get this straight," she says. "emBoth/em of your parents are doctors?"

"They met in medical school. Or, actually, they met at an undergraduate production of emMy Fair Lady/em and then discovered that they were in the same medical college-"

Santana holds up a hand. "Two doctors is the important part here, I don't need to here about their romantic comedy stylings on the way to suburbia," she says. "You're telling me that you have two parents making insane kinds of bank, and you were dragging your heels about stealing one of their credit cards _one time_?"

"Well, I didn't steal it, I asked for it and promised that I wouldn't-" Rachel breaks off when she sees the way that Santana is staring at her. _And_ Santana is sprawled all over the bed so thoroughly that Rachel has no other choice but to perch in the neat wooden chair which ordinarily sits in front of her desk, and she is fairly certain that Santana should have learned to share at some point before her junior year of high school, especially when she's in someone else's room. This is a point that Rachel should be making. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"There is so much wasted potential in you," Santana sighs, flopping back down. "You're like a big tub of squishy Play-Doh." She sounds pleased enough to make Rachel wonder, briefly, if Santana's plans for this Play-Doh don't involve an eventual end in a jail cell. She means, she is fairly certain that Santana would be able to get her out again if she tried hard enough, but she seems to reserve that level of forethought for Brittany. Rachel is rather glad that they are nowhere near Tijuana. "So, how lame is the assignment this week?"

"Actually, I started taking notes, and—" Santana is giving her an eyebrow. Rachel is not certain when she graduated up from the squinty-glare-thing, but Santana gives Brittany the eyebrow a lot, too, so it can't be an entirely bad thing. "I mean, totally lame. But if you wanted to work on the lameness together, my outlines are color-coded."

"I'll think about it." Santana goes back to looking up at Rachel's ceiling, twirling a piece of hair idly about her finger, and Rachel leans back a little further in her chair. This is nice, this having a friend thing. She wonders if it's nice for Santana, too, since as far as Rachel knows the only other friend that Santana has is Brittany, but that at least gives her a basis for comparison.

"Did you know that Puck is, like, completely obsessed with Finn being gay?" Santana asks suddenly.

"What?" Rachel leans forward in her chair again. This is gossip. She knows how gossip works; usually it's about her.

"Yeah." Santana laughs a little. "He's totally convinced that Finn is going to come out some day. He's even practiced his speech for how he's going to handle it." The corn dog staring contest suddenly makes sense now. Rachel tilts her head to one side as she considers this while Santana goes on. "I mean, on the one hand I can see it, because no one insists that hard that they're not gay unless they're curved at least a little bit more than a stick of spaghetti. On the other, though..." Santana grins up at the ceiling and keeps twirling her hair around her finger. "Yeah, we both know that he's not gay."

Rachel shifts in her chair a little bit, feeling uncomfortable. If part of being friends with Santana is not being jealous of her getting the occasional solo, or being jealous that she and Finn went out a few times, then Rachel's not sure what she's supposed to do about this conversation, if she's allowed to not like it and then say that she doesn't like it—she's pretty sure that the pastor at the food kitchen made the mistake of trying to tell Santana "no." "Finn and I have been completely open with each other about the fact that you two went out," she says. Not that it makes Rachel feel wonderful about herself, but she and Quinn even manage to be mostly civil at this point, and if everyone in the club stopped being friends with one another based upon their romantic entanglements...well. Everyone would have led a high-school existence very similar to Rachel's, quite frankly. "And I just want you to know, that I am completely open and okay with other people's expressions of mutual affection, but—" She draws herself up. "It really does not make me comfortable to get into discussions of your heavy petting session with my boyfriend. Are you sure that you don't want to talk about this week's assignment instead?" Santana has raised herself up on one elbows and is giving Rachel a look that Rachel can't read, because it's halfway between the squinty-eyed glare thing and the look of deep confusion that Brittany wears, um, everywhere. "I was thinking that you could totally rock some _Evita_ if you're not too worried about the ethnic typecasting. I mean, Madonna played the titular role in the movie, and she's about as Latina as a Daddy's tofu stir fry-"

"Rachel." Santana doesn't look happy. She also doesn't look angry, impatient, irritated, or as if she's planning anything that will wind up with credit card fraud and a fortuitous shopping spree. Rachel is out of readable expressions, then. "Finn and I had sex."

It's not even starting to frost at night yet, and Rachel has on her yellow sweater, but she still feels very, very cold. She waits several long seconds for Santana to crack and tell her that she's lying, even though this lie is mean even for her. Santana doesn't say anything. She also doesn't look gleeful, and Rachel quietly flails without knowing how to read the signals until she finally asks, "You what?"

"Had. Sex," Santana repeats slowly, the same tone that she uses on Brittany when she's trying to explain complex concepts like prepositions and sometimes the really hard verbs, but she doesn't look as if she's trying to deliberately be hurtful. "You know, the tab met the slot. Back during the spring, before Regionals."

Santana still doesn't look as if she's waiting for Rachel to cry so that she can whip her camera out from behind her back. Rachel's just not reading her well enough, then, because she and Santana have had a detente for all of a week and a half, that hardly makes up for what Rachel calculates to be approximately three-hundred pieces of gum stuck into her hair since the first grade, and maybe one-hundred and fifty to two hundred slushies to the face. It's hard to calculate the exact number; sometimes Santana gets others to do her dirty work for her, and sometimes even she has to adhere to a budget. Rachel should have known that this was all a trick. She stands up from her chair. Santana took longer to go about it than is her usual style, but Rachel still should have known.

"You're lying," Rachel says, very softly. There's something on Santana's face that it takes Rachel a second to read, and it's well enough that it's gone again almost before Rachel figures out what it is, because if there is one person that she will never accept pity from, it's Santana. Not from her.

"Sweetie," Santana says with a remarkable lack of condescension, sitting up on the edge of the bed, "I don't need to lie about who I sleep with, and if I did do you really think that I would pick out_ Finn_ as the cream of the crop? Jeez, I already said that we haven't banged while the two of you have been together, I'm totally working on that." She holds out her wrist so that Rachel can see the rubber band around it. "It helped my dad quit smoking, but I still say they should have a patch or something."

But Finn had said. But Finn had _said_. Rachel is caught between the person who ignored her for ten years of ignoring her and the person who spent that decade randomly tormenting her, and she finds herself saying, "Get out."

Santana actually looks startled. "What?" she asks. The squinty-eyed glare thing is coming back, but Rachel doesn't even think to be afraid of it.

"I want you out of my house," Rachel says. "I don't know what you've been doing, but I just want you to know, I think it's really mean, and I would rather have no friends at all than, than-than someone who's just mad because people are finally treating her the way that she's treated them this whole time."

Santana slides off of Rachel's bed in a move that can only be called a slink, but she's still on the other side of the room for now, and Rachel thinks that maybe Santana is actually just going to leave the way that Rachel has asked her to. "Are you kidding me, Berry, or do you just need to trade in your Claires' headband for one in a big-girl size?" she asks. "Because you might want to watch your insults: I called the dogs off of you, and I can just as easily put all of them right back on again. It's not like you have that many people running in to protect you."

Rachel has been very, very confused for the past week. She's almost glad that that's over, except for the part where she wants to cry a little bit. There's an ugly word that she's never said before in her life balanced right at the tip of her tongue; she swallows it back, but only barely, and closes her hands into fists at her sides. "I might be lonely," she says, "but at least I'm not a—" The word is very close. "A jezebel who only knows one way to make people be my friend."

Santana goes pale. Rachel has about half a second to think that that was too far before Santana pounds across the room and is up in her face. Not for the first time in her life, Rachel wonders why she's so petite when both of her biological parents get to be actually person-sized. She still manages to lift her chin as Santana leans over her and tells herself that, while there are a lot of things within this room that Santana could conceivably hit her with, several of them are filled with responsibly-grown plush (Santana had made sure to mock all of them thoroughly before settling down on the bed), and her dads will hear her if she screams. Even if no one in this house is quite familiar with the etiquette of the sleepover, Rachel can make sure that she's off-pitch. They'll be up here in seconds.

"Really, Rachel?" Santana asks her, silky-smooth. "You think that that's going to hurt me?" The muscle is ticking in her jaw again, but gets the feeling that it would be dangerous to break eye contact for too long. "Let me tell you something, you little knee-sock wearing midget." Rachel wants to interrupt, but she's scared of the finger in her face. "You really think that just because I helped you out last weekend out of some morbid desire to confuse my mom and didn't actively torture you at school, that means we're friends?" Rachel starts to open her mouth. The finger starts looking menacing until she shuts it again. "No. As much as having an island of misfit toys hanging around me at lunch can only make me feel better by comparison, you aren't exactly the investment that I thought you would be. The only reason that you didn't get slushied to hell and back in your very first big-girl dress is because I told half the football team and all of the other Cheerios that I would staple their scrotums to their lockers if they messed with you. You're still every bit the loser you always were."

Feeling very small, and not only because Santana has a weird way of elongating her neck for even better looming when she's really pissed, Rachel says, "You know, you might have more friends if you weren't always so terrible."

Santana reaches the bedroom door before she sniffs and looks back. "And you might have _any_ friends if you weren't always so desperate." The door slams so hard that Rachel can hear something drop downstairs.

"It can't be that bad tomorrow," Rachel says to herself. She feels very close to crying, and when she tries to dial Finn's phone number so that he can explain himself, she hangs up before it can complete the first ring.

There are three slushies before lunch. Rachel finally gives up, nearly in tears, and gives Tina the combination to her locker while she hides in the bathroom. Tina returns with a dark red that will hide cherry pretty well and, in less happy news, Quinn.

"I don't think that she fits into my locker," Rachel says waspishly as she turns back to the sink and starts hitting up the hand soap dispenser so that she can work on the sticky tips of her hair. Her voice quavers slightly as she adds, "No offense, Quinn, your figure is rather remarkable for someone who gave birth less than six months ago."

"Pilates," Quinn says, leaning up against the bathroom door so that no one else can enter. Since the bell rang a full five minutes ago, Rachel doesn't imagine that that's terribly likely. "And Mercedes' mom also recommended a really good cleanse."

"You had more than one in there," Tina says to Rachel as she hands her the new sweater, not sounding particularly surprised. Rachel has long wondered if the reason that Tina wears so much black has less to do with matching it to the streaks in her hair that week and more with the fact that it hid the signs of bullying remarkably well. "I tried to pick a color that would make you happy."

The yellow sweater that she's wearing right now is the one that actually makes her happiest, when it's not splattered with so much dye and frozen sugar that Rachel isn't certain that it's ever going to come clean again. She sniffles and gives up on her hair for the moment so that she can pull it over her head and attempt to scrub the worst out with more of the hand soap, mostly without success. Tina takes pity and starts trying to work out the tangles for her, wincing a little as her fingers get caught in the syrup.

"I'm going to go get my makeup bag," Quinn says, leaning up from the door.

"Stop by my locker," Tina tells her. "I have some hotel shampoo in there." When Rachel looks at her, she says, "Still one of you, remember?"

"Thanks." Rachel gives up on the sweater for a moment and starts washing the sticky residue of corn syrup off of her stomach. She's been through a lot of assaults via frozen beverages in her life, but it's been a long time since a day has made her just want to quit. "I should have known that she would do something like this. I just feel so stupid."

"Santana?" While Rachel is working on washing the slushie off of her stomach and neck, Tina is wringing out the sweater in another sink to try again. "We were all kind of wondering if she had naked pictures on you or something. I think she got a hundred bucks out of Puck."

"No," Rachel says as Quinn returns with the makeup bag and the shampoo and resumes her post at the door. "I just thought that she might be nice under all of that." By the door, Quinn makes a sound which sounds as if she's making a judgment on the intelligence of Rachel, Santana, and Tina at once, but she doesn't say anything as Tina starts helping Rachel clean up her hair, and she only sighs a little bit as she thrusts her makeup bag in Rachel's direction and tells her that it's okay if Rachel borrows her eyeliner as long as she doesn't press too hard.

"Hey, I didn't see you in English today," Finn says when he spots her in the lunchroom. He tries to kiss her and gets the wrinkle between his eyes that Rachel ordinarily thinks is adorable when she turns her face away. "Ohhh-kay. Did you change clothes?"

"Just my sweater," Rachel says, pushing her hair back behind her ear. There was only so much that could be done in the bathroom without electrical outlets, and Quinn wasn't willing to back to her locker for a hair dryer and flat-iron in any case, but no one has thrown anything at her in going on forty-seven whole minutes now. Thirty-five of them were while she was in the bathroom. "I need to talk to you." She pulls Finn a little bit to the side and watches his face shift, become a little wary.

"Did I miss a date?" he asked. "Was there something special about that sweater? Because you have to leave me a post-it note or something about these things-"

"Did you sleep with Santana last spring?" Rachel asks in a rush. Finn looks like someone hit him in the back of the head with a board.

"Just one time," Finn says, "And we weren't together yet, and she smelled really, really good and kept humming Madonna songs, it was weird."

"But you lied to me about it," Rachel says. "Why would you lie to me about it?" This is the point where Finn should say something. This is the point where, if this were a scripted romantic comedy where everything was going to turn out okay and possibly end with the adoption of either a small child or a puppy, Finn would know just what to say, but instead he's looking at Rachel like she's a math problem and she is suddenly just so very tired. "You know, you're not a very good boyfriend sometimes, Finn," Rachel says. "And you can make me feel really bad about myself." That seems to be today's theme. Rachel pushes past Finn and goes to eat her salad outside in the quad. Basic, boring romaine with an organic dressing. She was too nervous this morning to put any artistry into it.

Either Quinn put some kind of spell over Rachel's sweater when she went to get her makeup bag and Tina's shampoo-only in a movie made before 1980 would Tina be the witch, with the amount of black that she wears-or red really is just magical, but Rachel manages to go without taking another slushie to the face or any other part of her body for the entire rest of the school day. She goes to glee practice and sits on one end of the space while Finn sits on the other, moping so spectacularly that Puck is starting to look vaguely panicked, and Rachel swears that she see him mouth, "Go time" to himself more than once. No one tries to comfort Rachel, even though the entire school has to know that she and Finn are fighting by now. She does notice that Tina is sitting a chair or two closer than she normally does, though, and that Quinn rolls her eyes and then pokes Kurt in the side when he looks at Rachel's sweater and opens his mouth. If Mr. Schuester picks up the weird tension in the room, he roams his eyes across all of them and decides not to comment.

"Okay," he says, clapping his hands together. "This week's theme was 'literature', because I wanted you to learn how to tell a story through a song. Who wants to go first?" There is a resounding silence throughout the room, and Rachel can see Mr. Schuester's eyebrows go up to match the way that Rachel's hand doesn't. She turns her face away, refusing to explain that she is not in an emotional state to bring her magic to the masses right now. "Wow, a lot of people being shy today that I wouldn't have expected. Fair enough. Santana, why don't you start us off?"

Santana manages to make her whole body look like a roll of the eyes as she pulls herself out of her chair and goes down to the front of the room. "I chose to sing the Cranberries classic 'Dream', from the Babysitters' Club motion picture," she says. Mr. Schuester starts to open his mouth. Santana's can now officially count even school officials among those that she can put down with a look, at least temporarily. "Because I don't care what anyone thinks of me."

"If that's what you want to do," Mr. Schuester says slowly, and by now he would have to be doing as many illicit substances as Kurt frequently speculates in order to have not noticed that there is something wrong within the room. "That's...an interesting interpretation of the lyrics, but it does fit the criteria. Let's see what you have."

Santana starts, and it's clear right away that something is wrong. She's hitting all of the notes, but there's no power to them, none of the force that she normally brings to her songs. It's the most depressed rendition that Rachel has ever heard of. She feels a little better about herself by the time that it's over. Santana's fists are clenched tightly enough that Rachel can see half-moons etched into the skin whenever Santana does give in and let go a little.

"An admirable effort," Mr. Schuester says when Santana is finished. "Though it didn't look like you were having much fun up there." He looks around the room. "Guys, I don't know what's going on right now-"

"Most of us are missing chapters, too," Kurt interrupts. "Don't worry, I think you'll be happier that way."

"Right." Mr. Schuester honestly does not look as if he disagrees. "Be that as it may, let's try to pick things up a little bit. Come on, this is supposed to be fun, shake it off."

The only person who manages to shake it off throughout the rest of the hour in any way is Puck, who gets into a spirited argument with Mr. Schuester about whether or not he's allowed to sing a song from _Batman_ on the grounds that comics are literature as much as the young adult novels are, and the song is U2. "That's Bono, man, that's crazy twisted." Mr. Schuester is looking like all of the rest of the teachers in the school, which is with an air of having a constant eye on CNA qualification classes and getting the hell out of there, by the time that he waves at all of them to just go at the end of the hour.

Rachel goes out to her car and sees Santana getting into hers at the same time, and by reflex goes around to the passenger side to be sure that nothing has been keyed into it. Santana catches what she's doing and rolls her eyes, her lips pressed together into a thin, angry line that his completely ruining her liner. She has her cell phone in one hand; her knuckles are white around it.

"Like I'm going to do anything that will get me a criminal record," she sniffs. "You're not the only one who plans to get out of this town."

Rachel jingles her keys in her hands and sniffs. "And getting people to throw slushies in my face all day doesn't count as assault?" she asks.

Santana does that unnerving swivel to look at her, and for the first time out here in direct light Rachel notices that there is a tiny spot of purple on the shoulder of Santana's Cheerios uniform, high up near the neck. Rachel's eyes widen; she wonders if she can find the perpetrator by going through the local hospital records. "I don't need to direct people to throw slushies at you," she says. "You're a shining beacon of light all by yourself."

But if Santana wasn't telling people to mean to her all day long-she's not sure that that's actually any better. "You would have more friends if you were nicer to people," Rachel tells Santana softly, going back around to the driver's side of her car.

"And you would have more friends if you didn't come from Middle Earth, we've been over this," Santana snaps but then softens for the barest of seconds, probably because Rachel's not looking at her head-on. "But I didn't have to threaten too many people not to ruin your dress yesterday, so call that progress. You'll have to turn to a life of selling meth before you can ever afford to step into that store again-"

"You know, it's really best to stop with a compliment while you're still complimenting someone," Rachel interrupts her. They're still standing warily with Rachel's car between them. She isn't sure if this is a conversation or a squaring up, but she had to eat her lunch alone again, and it had really, really sucked, and she thinks that being friends with a cactus is still better than being friends with no one at all. Maybe. When the cactus is in a good mood. "I liked your Cranberries song. The only reason that it didn't work was because you weren't happy."

"Yeah, well." Santana sniffs, rolls her shoulders, and just for a second seems to glance in the direction of her shoulder, where the tiny purple spot would be cowering in terror and running for its life if it had any sense at all. "They were my favorite books when I was little. I've had a bad day, and I thought it would put me in a better mood." She looks at Rachel. Rachel looks at the hood of her car. "If I had known how much a slushie to the face stings, I might have thrown them underhand at you all these years."

Rachel frowns, because she's pretty sure that's not how an apology is supposed to go. She still finds herself saying, "Thank you. I-should not have implied that you were a loose woman. I have nothing against promiscuity, and I was angry."

"The word that you're looking for is 'slut'," Santana tells her.

"Yes, well, it's an ugly word and I don't like it. It sounds like something you would fumigate out of your garden."

Santana laughs, one of the few times that Rachel has heard her do it without the touch of meanness involved. "And I used to think you were shitting us with that etiquette crap," she says. "Whatever, I'm over it. Just tell me that you called your ho boyfriend the same thing before you broke up with him and I won't even be mad."

"I didn't break up with him," Rachel says. "We're, um...fighting a little bit right now, but that's all."

"Work in progress." Santana shrugs. "I didn't slap the shit out of Puck over you, after all."

"Thank you for that." Rachel starts to unlock her car and then stops. "Look, Santana, you might have noticed that I don't have a lot of experience with having friends." She holds up her hand before Santana can say anything. "So I just want to say, I really liked the week that we weren't at each other's throats, and if we can't be friends, I would prefer it if we weren't enemies. My grandmother gave me that sweater and I don't know how much more it can take."

Santana does the squinty-thing, this time with approximately thirty percent less glare. She purses her mouth, then raps her keys against the top of the car as if she's making a decision and clicks the beeper to unlock the passenger side door. "Get in," she says. "I have to go pick up Brittany from the animal shelter, she maced a county worker and I'll need help distracting her if they have any ferrets."

Rachel decides to go with the most obvious part of the sentence first. "She _what_?"

Looking slightly defensive, Santana explains, "I did Stranger Danger with her just this morning, it was a white van that had puppies inside. She got confused."

"Could have happened to anyone," Rachel says, raising her eyebrows slightly, but she's still shifting her bag onto her shoulder and coming around to Santana's car, giving very little thought to the fact that she's kind of trusting in Santana not to drop her off at the edge of town and take her shoes. She smiles when Santana snaps her a glare.

"You know," Santana says as she starts the car and backs them out of the space. "I really didn't have to bribe too many people to stop them from throwing things at you yesterday. Two or three, tops."

Rachel warms, pleased. "I'm thinking of wearing the dress again next week."

"Don't overwork it. You really ought to take your dad's credit card again and just buy another one."

"That is not going to happen."

"We'll call it a 'maybe'."

End


End file.
